Amy Cooper

I am a cultural and medical anthropologist who studies medical systems as sites of political struggle and transformation. My book State of Health: Pleasure and Politics in Venezuelan Health Care under Chávez (2019, University of California Press) is based on fifteen months of ethnographic research on poor and working class people’s experiences of health care in Caracas. For the past fifteen years, I have researched the meanings of health, mental health, and medicine in urban Venezuela, Cuba, and the United States and am developing a new study of people’s experiences of mental health in Costa Rica. I am currently an assistant professor of anthropology at Saint Louis University.

Posts by This Author

Protests and Polarization in Venezuela After Chávez

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Protests and Polarization in Venezuela After Chávez

February 2014—less than a year after the death of President Hugo Chávez—marked the beginning of a series of protests that raised important questions about the f... More

Life After Hugo Chávez

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Life After Hugo Chávez

Whether cast as authoritarian strongman or brilliant revolutionary, Hugo Chávez and the movement he led undeniably transformed the socio-political terrain of Ve... More